The Nabob eBook

in finance, chain my fortune to the car of the conquerors
of the day; and now here I am back again in the saddest
pages of my history, clerk in a bankrupt establishment,
my duty to answer a horde of creditors, of shareholders
drunk with fury, who load my white hairs with the worst
outrages, and would like to make me responsible for
the ruin of the Nabob and the flight of the governor;
as if I myself was not as cruelly struck by the loss
of my four years of arrears, and my seven thousand
francs which I had confided to that scoundrel of Paganetti
de Porto-Vecchio.

But it is my fate to empty the cup of humiliation
and degradation to the dregs. Have I not been
made to appear before a Juge d’Instruction—­I,
Passajon, former apparitor of the faculty, with thirty
years of faithful service, and the ribbon of Officer
of the Academy? Oh! when I saw myself going up
that staircase of the Palace of Justice, so big, so
conspicuous, without a rail to hold by, I felt my head
turning and my legs sinking under me. I was forced
to reflect there, crossing these halls, black with
lawyers and judges, studded with great green doors
behind which one heard the imposing noise of the hearings;
and up higher, in the corridor of the Juges d’Instruction,
during my hour’s waiting on a bench, where the
prison vermin crawled on my legs, while I listened
to a lot of thieves, pickpockets, and loose women talking
and laughing with the gendarmes, and the butts of
the rifles echo in the passages, and the dull roll
of prison vans. I understood then the danger
of “combinations,” and that it was not
always good to ridicule M. Gogo.

What reassured me, however, was that never having
taken any part in the deliberations of the Territorial,
I had no share in their dealings and intrigues.
But explain this to me: Once in the judge’s
office, before that man in a velvet cap looking at
me across his table with his little eyes like hooks,
I felt so pierced through, searched, turned over to
the very depth of my being, that, in spite of my innocence,
I wanted to confess. Confess what? I don’t
know. But that is the effect which the law had.
This devil of a man spent five minutes looking at me
without speaking, all the while turning over a book
filled with writing not unknown to me, and suddenly
he said, in a mocking and severe tone:

“Well, M. Passajon, how long is it since the
affair of the drayman?”

The memory of a certain little misdeed, in which I
had taken part in my days of distress, was already
so distant that I did not understand at once; but
some words of the judge showed me how completely he
knew the history of our bank. This terrible man
knew everything, down to the least details, the most
secret things. Who could have informed him so
thoroughly?